roystgnr comments on [LINK] Why taking ideas seriously is probably a bad thing to do - Less Wrong

23 Post author: David_Gerard 05 January 2013 11:37PM

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Comment author: roystgnr 07 January 2013 06:12:16PM *  5 points [-]

You'll want to read an earlier Yvain blog post, then, explaining "many reasons to expect that arguments for socially dominant beliefs (which correlate highly with truth) to be worse than the arguments for fringe beliefs (which probably correlate highly with falsehood)".

Comment author: ewbrownv 08 January 2013 11:16:23PM 1 point [-]

Why would you expect the social dominance of a belief to correlate with truth? Except in the most trivial cases, society has no particular mechanism that selects for true beliefs in preference to false ones.

The Darwinian competition of memes selects strongly for those that provide psychological benefits, or are politically useful, or serve the self-interest of large segments of the population. But truth is only relevant if the opponents of a belief can easily and unambiguously disprove it, which is only possible in rare cases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 January 2013 10:42:41PM 3 points [-]

Or if acting on the damage caused by having a bad model of reality is worse than the signaling benefit of the false belief.